Social anxiety, auto-erotic intellectualism, and a whole lot of falling on my butt.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Fear is the Mind Killer

I have no less than 20 entries queued up, but they're all crap. They're woebegotten crap. They're customer service epic fail crap. They're rambling stories that make no sense crap. I save them, shove them in the vault, and swear that I'll come back in a few hours, and edit them to something vaguely resembling coherency.

I never do. Because I'm a perfectionist, and they're crap.

All the while, the quadzillion other blogs I read keep racing past me, and 50 Shades of Fucking Grey is a bestseller.

I almost maybe totally believe that even the first draft shit I crank out is better than 50 Shades of Fucking Grey.

So. I can either:

Keep convincing myself that I'm a shit writer, and never write anything, ever. (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Freeze instinct, which gives me that mild pleasure of base satisfaction by doing a thing that my body is naturally inclined to do when coping with difficulties, ie, nothing. It is largely a shit plan.)

Keep writing, sporadically, and burying everything I write in a poorly tagged, poorly organized slushpile where it will never see the light of day, but, hey, I WROTE things! (This plan is awesome, insofar as it satisfies my Flight instinct, where I see something wrong then scamper away in the other direction, because dealing with things is haaaaaaaard. It is also largely a shit plan.)

Publish ("publish," lol) things anyway, even if they're not perfect, because some content is better than no content? I don't know. I can't bring myself to subscribe to that one, because putting imperfect, poorly constructed entries (like this one! Oh, the irony!) out towards a bunch of internet strangers (web crawling bots) makes me feel like I'm failing. Letting someone (mostly myself) down.

I try to cram this in to last year's mantra of Do One Thing, and my brain overloads. How can I Do One Thing, when that one thing isn't good enough, isn't coherent enough? Of course, if I listened to that part of my brain while I was skating, I'd never do anything, ever.

So I'm publishing this, even though it's self indulgent and whiny, and I'm hoping that something about that action will break the gates, and allow me to start actually pushing out some of the writing that I've been doing.

7 comments:

Meatball Posse makes one movie a year. It is not always good. It is almost always not super great. And it costs us (me!) money. But we do it. Once a year, for 10 years.

So get off your ass and publish your words for free. Failure is a great teacher. Every thing we fuck up when we make a movie we try to do better on the next one. So do your One Thing (that costs you nothing) and learn from it, good or bad. Goddammit.

Also, our movie this year is called "48 Shades Of Red". There was lots of fake blood. None of us read that "Grey" book, and only have a passing understanding of what it is about. And that's OK with me.

Hey I feel really strongly about this issue, so I'm going to comment: I think if you're unsure about whether to publish work or not because of its quality, you should publish it. Put it out under a different name if you're worried about mixing the better quality stuff with the lower quality stuff. It's just so much more likely that you'll find people who like your lower quality stuff and can encourage you, than that you'd scare people away with it, and the both effects are ultimately positive and transformative for us as artists anyway. By the way, lower quality is really "lower quality" in scare quotes, because it's not good or bad, just a different artistic product that's less time intensive to produce. And someday I will listen to my own advice and put out all my recordings that I'm holding back because they need editing...

The issue, for me, isn't so much quality (I'm not changing the world over here), but rather, clarity. I have issues with editing and rambling, using the voice-in-my-head as the voice-on-the-page, and feel like everything I crank out is just a mite too raw for general consumption. Maybe that's it, that's my niche, and that's something that I need to learn to be comfortable with, but I can't help but wish that I were a better editor.

Sorry about my earlier comment. I think ultimately I feel the same way as you about my own work, and that's why I took down all my old recordings and haven't put up my new ones. And I think oh, well, sometime I'll go back and edit or re-record everything, but I probably won't. Hopefully you will fare better.

M'ris, it sounds like you're afraid of showing your brain to your friends. Well tough shit. Your friends love you because of your brain. The voice in your head is you, and we love you. And we understand. And it's ok if you think we don't or we won't or we can't. That's when you publish under a fake name and then link to it saying "check out this person i randomly found on teh intarwebz. what do you think of that, oh wonderful friends of mine?"